BETA

BETA is based upon and derived from BOOST (Bibliography of Old
Spanish Texts), originally compiled starting in 1974 as part of the
computer-assisted Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language project at the
Medieval Spanish Seminary of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The
purpose of BOOST was to aid in the selection of the corpus upon which that
dictionary was to be based.

BETA has evolved dramatically since 1974, both in purpose and in scope.
Like its congeners BITAGAP, BITECA, and BIPA, BETA's purpose now is
nothing less than to provide a comprehensive union catalog of the primary sources,
manuscript and printed, for the study of medieval Spanish culture.
The original 966 entries of the first edition of BOOST (1975) have
expanded to the almost 30,000 of this new web version.

BETA focuses on texts written in Castilian, but also includes materials
of cultural interest in dialectos afines: Leonese, Navarro, Aragonese, and
Mozarabic, as well as aljamiado materials in Hebrew or Arabic script in any of
these dialects. We define "cultural interest" broadly: all non-notarial texts
dealing with any subject matter whatsoever—e.g., history, law, science,
agriculture, theology, philosophy—as well as imaginative prose and poetry.

The texto-tipo is the specific copy of a given work used to establish its
identity. I.e., when we refer to a copy of a work in a given manuscript or
printed edition as the texto-tipo for that work, we mean that this text as
found in this MS or printed edition is the touchstone to which all other copies
of the text should be compared. It does not necessarily mean that it is the
archetype, the oldest copy of the text, or the best copy of the text.

For example, there appear to be at least eight different
translations of the Epistola de gubernatione rei familiaris attributed to St. Bernard
of Clairvaux. The text-types for the three which follow are found in manuscripts
in the Escorial or the BNE:

As other copies of the various translations are found, they can be grouped
together into families around the text-type.

Dates:

The dates found in the descriptions of manuscripts in
traditional printed catalogs (e.g., "s. XV in.," "middle of the 15th c.," "s. XV ex.") have been converted to numeric equivalents for the purposes of searching and sorting. Thus "s. XV in." becomes "1401-1410." However, this does not mean that a given manuscript was necessarily written between those two dates. The meaning is exactly that conveyed by "s. XV in." or "beginning of the 15th c."

The following equivalences use fifteenth century dates for illustrative purposes:

Exact dates are expressed in Arabic numerals in the format YYYY-MM-DD, again for the purposes of sorting and searching. See the following examples:

1463 = precisely dated on basis of colophon or other trustworthy evidence

1463-03 = March 1463

1463-03-08 = March 8, 1463

1463 a quo — 1475 ad quem = between 1463 and 1475 (Dates that can be deduced, usually on the basis of internal evidence.)

1406-12-31 a quo — 1423-09-18 ad quem = between December 31, 1406, and September 18, 1423. (Dates that can be deduced, usually on the basis of internal evidence.)

1453 [?] = dated in 1453, but without certainty

1453 [!] = dated erroneously in 1453

1493 ca. [?] = dated around 1493, but without certainty. (Usually offered by one source but disputed by another.)

1488-1491 [!], 1491 ca. [!], 1490 = MS or printed edition dated erroneously 1488-91 by one source, around 1491 by another, also erroneously, and correctly in 1490 by a third.

The dates of both works and manuscripts have been established as precisely as
possible by comparative means as well. Thus the terminus a quo of a
manuscript can be set by the date of the latest work it contains; while the
terminus ad quem of a work can be set by the date of the earliest
manuscript that contains it or by internal documentation.
For example, the composition of Part IV of the General estoria of
Alfonso X must have been finished before the transcription of the
earliest MS that contains it, Vat. Urb. lat. 539 (1280) (BETA manid 1077);
while the copying of Part I of the same text in BNM 10236 (BETA manid 1059) must
have been finished before March 25, 1458, the date of death
of Íñígo López de Mendoza,
Marquess of Santillana, for whom it was transcribed.
Similarly, Gonzalo de Ocaña's translation of the Diálogos
of St. Gregory (BETA texid 1360) must have been finished before ca. 1460,
the date of death of Fernán Pérez de Guzmán,
to whom the translation was dedicated.

Since the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language (DOSL) was conceived as a
citation-based lexicon, like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
Lloyd Kasten, its director, and John Nitti, associate director, realized that
they needed to seek those citations in authentic medieval texts produced prior
to 1500 rather than in modern editions, whose editorial criteria varied widely.
Thus the first edition of BOOST (1975), compiled in-house by Jean Gilkison
and Anthony Cárdenas under the supervision of Nitti,
included references only to manuscripts copied before 1501 or to incunabula,
i.e., printed editions prior to 1501. These were taken initially from the
first edition of the Bibliografía de la literatura española
of José Simón Díaz, whose volume on medieval literature
was published in 1953, and supplemented with references to the pre-1501
Escorial manuscripts taken from the Blessed Julián Zarco Cuevas'
Catálogo de los manuscritos castellanos de la Real Biblioteca de
El Escorial (1924-29), the first catalogue of medieval Spanish manuscripts
that merits the name, as well as the introductions to the various editions
of medieval Spanish works and other materials in the Seminary.
The sources of the second edition (1977) included the nine published
volumes of the Inventario general de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Nacional
(the only ones which had appeared to that time) as well.

For the technical history of BOOST and BETA, see the PhiloBiblon
Home Page.

The first edition of BOOST (1975) contained 966 entries, each one
listing a given text in a given manuscript or printed edition,
organized by author and title; the second edition (1977), organized the same
way, contained 1,869 entries. The third edition (1984), now under the
editorial control of a team of outside scholars (Charles Faulhaber, Ángel
Gómez Moreno, David Mackenzie, Brian Dutton),
contained 3,378 entries, organized topographically by city, library,
shelfmark, and folio order within a given volume.

Because BOOST no longer focused exclusively on providing support
for DOSL, one of the first decisions of the new editorial team was to include
manuscripts produced after 1501; although for purely practical reasons that
year remained the cut-off date for printed editions.

Berkeley

In 1985 editorial and production work was centralized at Berkeley,
although the editorial team continued to collaborate closely with Madison's
Medieval Spanish Seminary. In 1987, thanks to a grant from IBM, BOOST was
ported from a main frame flat file database into Revelation (later Advanced
Revelation, from Revelation Technologies), a high-end, DOS-based relational
database management system.

In 1993 the DOS version of PhiloBiblon, with three of its component
bibliographies (BETA, BITAGAP, BITECA), was published on CD-ROM as part of
disk 0 of ADMYTE (Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Españoles),
produced by Micronet, S.A. (Madrid), with the support of the Biblioteca Nacional
and the Sociedad Estatal del Quinto Centenario and under the direction of
Francisco Marcos Marín in company with Faulhaber and Gómez Moreno.
A new, revised, and expanded edition of the DOS version was published on
CD-ROM in 1999 by The Bancroft Library. It is now out of print.

Changes over time

With the third edition of BOOST (1984), the original descriptions taken
from secondary sources were supplemented with additions based on first-hand
consultation of manuscripts by a large number of scholars, but especially by
the compilers of that edition; and BOOST's scope was expanded radically.

Currently, all MSS of medieval Spanish works produced before 1800 are included,
with selected MSS from the 19th and even 20th centuries that may reflect
now-lost originals. As for printed books, some post-1501 editions have been
included, chiefly on the basis of F. J. Norton's fundamental A Descriptive
Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal 1501-1520 (Cambridge, 1978).
Increasingly we shall be able to take advantage of Julián
Martín Abad's even more important Post-incunables ibéricos
(Madrid: Ollero y Ramos, 2001; Adenda, 2007); although the
editorial team has still not been able to cull information from that
work systematically.

In the current database the Analytic table, which most closely corresponds to
the original organization of BOOST, since it also lists a given text in a
given manuscript or printed edition, contains 9,973 records as of March 1, 2011,
more than ten times as many as the 966 entries of the first edition.
The other tables in BETA contain another 20,000 records with detailed
descriptions of manuscripts and printed editions, works, persons,
reference works, and libraries.

As in any database project that has existed for over thirty years,
criteria for data entry have expanded as the evolving data base management
system has made it possible to capture more information. Thus, in the
earliest years, only information absolutely essential for the purposes of DOSL
was recorded: Author, Title, Present Location, Original Production Date,
Specific Production Date, and secondary bibliography. Over time it became
obvious that codicological and bibliographical data should be added in order to
support the Specific Production Date; and that incipits and explicits should be
added to help identify specific copies of a given work.

Most recently, the compilers of BETA have attempted to document
exhaustively every manuscript and every copy of every edition on the basis of
first-hand knowledge. Where it was not possible to examine the volume itself,
such information was added on the basis of trustworthy secondary sources.
Thus, during 2007-2008, the Zarco Cuevas catalog of the Spanish manuscripts
in the Escorial was systematically culled for all relevant information,
supplementing in exhaustive detail the original descriptions taken from it
in Madison for the first and second editions of BOOST.

Similarly, the transcriptions, e.g., of incipits and explicits of texts
found in a given manuscript, have been made more detailed.
Thus the absence of initial capital letters has been shown by placing them in
square brackets: [A]. The height of initials has also been indicated with a
superscript to show the number of lines they occupy: [A]6 means that
the space for the missing initial "A" is six lines high.
Punctuation, omitted from the original transcriptions of incipits and explicits
because of its arbitrary use in modern editions, has been transcribed from the
originals. Line breaks have been shown in prose as well as in poetry.
These latter details are particularly important for printed texts, where they
frequently can be used to distinguish one edition from another.

Nevertheless, it has not been possible to revise systematically all records to
upgrade them to the current standards. Thus in practice some descriptions will be
extremely detailed and explicit while most are still quite succinct.
Over time, as the editorial team examines every manuscript or printed volume in situ,
all descriptions will be upgraded to the current standard.
In the meantime, we shall be extremely grateful for additions and corrections
to our data. These should be sent to Charles B. Faulhaber.

Scope and content

The number of manuscripts described first hand has increased considerably.
The descriptions of those in the Hispanic Society of America have benefited from
Faulhaber's work there. The BNE has also been the object of numerous campaigns
to examine firsthand the almost inexhaustible wealth of its manuscript and
early printed book holdings These campaigns have been supplemented with
information taken from the detailed descriptions in volumes 1-9 of the Inventario general de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Nacional
(1953-70; MSS 1-3026) and from the summary descriptions in volumes 10-15
(1984-2001; MSS 3027-11.000). The descriptions in the five unpublished
volumes (MSS 11.001-12.981) were provided to us in machine-readable form
thanks to the generous support of Julián Martín Abad and his
staff in the Sala Cervantes, particularly Lourdes Alonso.
In addition, both Gómez Moreno and Faulhaber have systematically
reviewed the BNE's card files.

During the fall of 2006 the same scholars also examined
the manuscript holdings of the Biblioteca Histórica "Marqués de
Valdecilla" of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as well as those of the
library of the Duchess of Alba in the Palacio de Liria.
Nevertheless, only about 1,000 of BETA's more than 5,700 manuscripts or
copies of printed editions have been examined first-hand by the compilers.

Fortunately, the number of excellent published catalogs of medieval manuscripts
in Spanish libraries has increased dramatically over the last fifteen or
twenty years, for example: Catálogo de manuscritos de la Real Academia
Española (1991), Catálogo de la Real Biblioteca. Manuscritos
(1994-1997), Catálogo de manuscritos de la Biblioteca Universitaria de
Salamanca (1997-2002), and Manuscritos españoles de la
Biblioteca Lázaro Galdiano (1998). We have used all of these but
still have not been able to extract all of the information they contain:
Falta de mano de obra.

With regard to early printed texts, BETA attempts to record every copy of
every edition along with the condition and provenance of each copy.
The basic repertories of Spanish incunabula (Haebler 1903-17, Vindel 1945-51) have
been used but still not exhaustively vaciados. However, we have
systematically culled the Catálogo general de incunables en
bibliotecas españolas of Francisco García Craviotto and the
Adiciones y correcciones of Martín Abad. The major national
catalogs have been examined as well (e.g., Goff 1964, 1972 for the United States;
Pellechet for France), but not necessarily systematically. We have yet to
tackle the
Incunabula Short Title
Catalogue maintained by the British Library. Essentially an international
electronic union catalog, it is intended to be a comprehensive listing of
all incunabula with locations of extant copies. However, it is still
very much a work in fieri; and, unlike BETA, it does not intend to
list every copy in a given library. BETA is also a work in fieri, but it
is already and will remain the enumerative and descriptive bibliography of
record for early printed books in Spanish.

Despite BETA's more than thirty years of existence, it is clear that
much remains to be done, especially with regard to the detailed codicological
description of individual manuscripts, the transcription of incipits and
explicits, and the identification of anonymous works.

In addition to our work with texts, manuscripts, and printed editions,
we have also paid a great deal of attention to the prosopographical background
of medieval Spanish literature. For example, Perea Rodríguez's archival
research in Valencia has added an enormous amount of information about
the poets of the Cancionero general (1511), while the five volumes of
the Diccionario de historia eclesiástica de España (1972-75;
supl. 1987) have given us the names and dates of all of the
bishops of Castile and Leon from ca. 1200 to 1500 and essential biographical
information for the most important ones. The same work has provided
information on medieval monastic and military orders, individual monasteries, and
their leaders (abbots, priors, commanders).

BETA's reference bibliography does not attempt to provide
comprehensive access to studies on medieval Spanish literature, a function
carried out more than adequately by the Boletín Bibliográfico
de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval. Rather
we focus on manuscript catalogs, codicological studies of individual
manuscripts, editions of texts, biographical studies, and similar works
rather than on critical studies of authors, texts, or genres.

In terms of subject areas and genres, we are confident that we have
identified most of the vernacular fueros, cortes, and other legal texts
on the basis of the 19th-c. editions of the Real Academia de la Historia and the
manuscripts in the Escorial, although numerous post-medieval witnesses remain
to be added. The listing of the major cancionero narrative poems is
virtually complete. The texts and witnesses of the vast majority of the
cancionero lyric still remain to be added, but scholars have access to
them thanks to Brian Dutton's monumental El cancionero del siglo XV. c.
1360-1520, especially as found in
An Electronic
Corpus of 15th Century Castilian
Cancionero Manuscripts, directed by Dorothy Severin at the
University of Liverpool. Nevertheless, incorporation of the medieval
lyric into BETA remains a major desideratum. The jarchas
present linguistic issues that we have preferred not to address
for the time being. (Nevertheless, the manuscripts in which they are
conserved have been well described by other scholars over the past
quarter of a century.) Except for witnesses that antedate 1501,
we have omitted the traditional lyric, collected systematically by
Margit Frenk in her Nuevo corpus de la antigua lírica popular
hispánica (siglos XV a XVII) (Mexico City: UNAM-Colegio de México-Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2003), which spares us this task, and the romancero
(catalogued similarly by the Seminario Menéndez Pida).

Electronic resources

Increasingly we have been able to tap into a wellspring of electronic innovation on the web. One of the sea changes that has taken place
over the last fifteen years or so is the availability of web-based electronic
texts and editions. Thus we cite and provide links to the
electronic transcriptions and editions found
in LEMIR (Literatura
Española Medieval y Renacimiento).

Even more useful, for those careful scholars who do not trust any
transcription or edition, are the partial or complete electronic
facsimiles of both manuscripts and printed editions that are beginning to
become available on the web. Pioneer in this respect was ADMYTE,
whose 55,000 pages of texts and facsimiles, originally released on CD-ROM,
are now available on the web as a subscription
service (http://www.admyte.com/home.htm).

The Biblioteca Digital Dioscórides of the Biblioteca
Histórica "Marqués de Valdecilla" of the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid was the first Spanish library to make facsimiles of its
important collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed books
systematically available.
One may cite such stunning pieces as the alfonsine royal scriptorium manuscript
of the Libros del saber de astronomía, BH MSS 156
(BETA manid 1091).

Other projects provide partial facsimiles. The Digital Scriptorium,
a collaborative project initiated in 1996 by Berkeley's Bancroft Library
and Columbia University, has became a visual union catalog of medieval
MSS in all western languages to ca. 1550. Currently it provides
descriptions and partial facsimiles at extremely high resolution
of 5,300 manuscripts from 27 American institutions.
Of these, sixty-three are in Spanish, including:

Fragments of the only known MS of Amadís de Gaula, from the
first quarter of the 15th c. (BETA manid 1182. Berkeley:
The Bancroft Library)

The best MS of the Crónica sarracina, mid-15th c. (BETA
manid 3602. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library)

Work on PhiloBiblon has thrown increasingly into relief the imperative
necessity of adequate facsimiles, transcriptions, and editions of all
medieval texts. Up to two thirds of all medieval Spanish texts are found
in only one manuscript. If that manuscript is lost or destroyed
before the text can be copied in some form, then the text itself is
lost, and with it an irreplaceable element of medieval
Spanish culture. ¡Manos a la obra!

BETA owes much of its information to the disinterested support of
numerous scholars. We are indebted, especially, to Gemma Avenoza for
descriptions of MSS and incunabula in Évora and many other libraries,
to José Aragüés, Fernando Baños, and Vanesa
Hernández Amez for their work on the Castilian translations of the
Legenda aurea, to Hugo Bizzarri for references to wisdom
literature, to Thomas Capuano for works on agriculture, to Juan
Carlos Conde for information about 15th-c. MSS and texts, to Ivy
Corfis for materials on chivalric literature and
numerous electronic transcriptions, to José Manual
Fradejas Rueda for references to works on falconry, to David Hook
for information on historical texts, to Francisco Marcos-Marín
for the catalog of the manuscript holdings of the Biblioteca Nacional
de Argentina, to Georgina Olivetto for descriptions of MSS
in the British Library, to Rebeca Sanmartín for those of
MSS in Santiago de Compostela and Orense, to Jesús Rodríguez
Velasco and Harvey Sharrer for materials on chivalric literature,
to Sharrer, Arthur Askins, Filipe Alves Moreira, and Pedro Pinto for Spanish manuscripts in
Portuguese libraries, and to a host of others for their assistance
with specific manuscripts and texts.

The compilers of BETA are also grateful for the support of the
following institutions:

WWW access to and use of PhiloBiblon are free of charge.
Reproduction of any materials found here is subject to the restrictions found
in our Copyright Statement.

Best results are obtained by using the latest-version WWW browsers
which both render tables well and support JavaTM, but every effort
will be made to present a generic service, accessible to any WWW viewing tool.

Readers are encouraged to send questions, comments, and any suggestions which
they might have for the improvement of this site to
Charles B. Faulhaber.